Penske Automotive Group, Inc. Q3 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-10-30 13:56:08.0

Tags: Penske Automotive Group Inc., Call Transcript, Leasing, Earnings, Stephens Inc., Capital Structures, Finance, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Richard Nelson - Stephens, Inc.

Richard Nelson - Stephens, Inc.

Can you talk about the ability of customers to get financing for vehicles? Are you seeing any opening up there?

Roger S. Penske

I think one of the things I think we have to look on a macro basis is that the credit markets have opened up substantially and securitization is now available to most of the key finance subsidiaries for the OEM, so I would say that from that standpoint it's opened. Certainly, we read where GM is going to get another couple of billion dollars, I think, from the government to support their balance sheet.

So from the OEM's perspective, and certainly from the ones that we deal with on the premium luxury side, that we see nobody backing up with us from the standpoint of availability of either lease or retail.

One thing we are seeing is certainly stipulations on credit. Advance rates probably have been curtailed a certain amount, so that would reduce grosses if we could not get the banks or captives to buy. So I think leasing, we've seen that open up. Our Cadillac business had a big spurt here over the last month and a half because they're now focused on leasing and I think that's going to be important as we go forward. But if you look traditionally, at Mercedes, at Lexus, at BMW, and Audi, 60% to 65% of their business is leasing and they're still in business today, so we feel good about that.

And when you think about residuals that are out there today, Toyota and Lexus has just announced that they've raised all their residuals on leases by 300 basis points and when you look at residuals in the market, you've been able to see really the ES 300 is up about 11% over the last year. You will have a 10% increase in the IS 250, and the RX is up 13%. So residual values are up, which really bodes well, obviously, for leasing.

And the same thing at BMW. You've seen some increases in 328s, up about 2%. The 7 Series is up about 6%. And then you go on to Audi, they've seen a 2% to 3% increase in most of their key product lines. So with that in place, I think we're going to see the captives being more aggressive as we go forward during the balance of this year and going into next.

 

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